“Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark just came up on random play and for some reason — I don’t know, maybe I’m just in a more pensive mood than usual — it really made me stop and think.
Full-nuclear weapons have only been deployed twice in the history of the world; against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 by the US military. Nobody knows the exact death toll (or at least the sites google pointed me at varied wildly), but best estimates are that the initial blast in Hiroshima killed seventy thousand, with another one hundred and thirty thousand dying in the months and years that followed. Add in the deaths in Nagasaki and the total death toll rises to three hundred and fifty thousand. These are historical facts I’ve been more or less conversant with for my entire adult life, but I’ve never really thought about what it means. It’s all too easy to think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as just two more bombing missions. Sure, they deployed some big weapons, but how much damage can just two planes do?
Three hundred and fifty thousand deaths.
The number is so large it almost looses all meaning. Combined with the historical distance it’s difficult to get a handle on what it represents at all. But when you think about it, when you really dwell on it for a moment the sheer destruction wrought by those two acts is staggering in scale. And terrifying in character. It is the equivanlent of the entire modern city of Bristol being wiped from the face of the Earth.
I’m not, for one moment, going to get into a discussion of the morality of the bombings; it’s been gone over a thousand times before and I for one believe more lives were saved by them than were lost to them. But it’s hard not to be moved and shocked by the magnitude of it.
On the eleventh of September 2001, two different planes wrought an act of destruction that shocked the world; Islamic extremist terrorists hijacked several passenger jets and flew them into key buildings in the USA — two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. _Everybody_ knows where they were when that happened; it was the defining moment in our recent political history. An entire generation had those images of the twin towers crashing to the ground etched into their memories. I can clearly remember, as though it was yesterday, sitting at work numb with the shock of it, hitting refresh on a web browser over and over again trying to get one of the badly overloaded news pages to load. I remember sitting at home in the evening, still numb, still in shock, staring at the same images being looped on the TV, literally aghast at what had been done. I could scarcely believe the amount of death and suffering that could be caused by just two planes.
The death toll on 9/11 was three thousand five hundred.
That’s just _one hundredth_ of the number of dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In New York two skyscrapers were brought down. In Hiroshima every building within _one and a half miles_ of ground zero was destroyed, literally flattened by the nuclear winds. What it comes down to is this: The most profoundly horrific and shocking moment in my life, a moment which brought the entire Western World to a standstill and which redefined the political landscape of the entire world was equal to just one percent of what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That _really_ gets you thinking about what two planes can do.
